Samsung Galaxy S II (Samsung GT-I9100)

Available
now14th
February 2011

The original Samsung
Galaxy S was one of the most significant Android devices to
be launched last year, and over the past year or so there have been
a number of derivatives including the "pure Google" Nexus
S. The follow up to the original Galaxy S is the imaginatively
named Samsung Galaxy S II which follows the trend of making
smartphones progressively bigger and more powerful.

The Galaxy S II is a dual core Android 2.3 smartphone with a
large 4.3" "Super AMOLED Plus" display, an 8 megapixel
camera on the back plus Samsung's own software enhancements to make
this a somewhat different experience from plain Android devices.

In design terms, this is a big black slab of a phone that looks
smart but dull at the same time. The front of the handset is dominated
by the large 800 x 480 pixel panel using a new version of Samsung's
AMOLED technology that they say gives a much sharper display. That's
a bigger panel than the original Galaxy S, but the phone itself
is only a little larger. It is a very slim device, at just 8.5mm
thick at its thinnest point, and surprisingly it only weighs 116
grams.

On the back of the Galaxy S II is a prominent 8 megapixel camera
with LED flash, capable of 1080p HD video recording at 30 fps, one
of the highest specifications that we've seen on any phone. On the
front is an ancillary 2 megapixel camera for video calling, something
that was missing on earlier Android handsets. The camera supports
geo-tagging, and Samsung always add useful enhancement such as smile
detection to the mix.

Inside
is a 1GHz dual-core Samsung application processor, (note:
this has been upgraded to 1.2GHz at launch) which we guess
is Samsung's new Exynos CPU coupled with a generous 1GB of
RAM which should help the Galaxy S II cope with the most demanding
of applications. Internal flash memory is 16GB or 32GB, with a microSD
slot that can take up to 32GB on top of that. It's a quad-band GSM
and quad-band UMTS device which also supports 802.11 a, b g and
n WiFi. The Galaxy S II also supports HSPA+ (sometimes marketed
as 4G although it isn't really) with maximum download speeds of
up to 21 Mbps.. if your carrier supports it, that is.

Multimedia playback is aided by the powerful CPU, so the Galaxy
S II can happily cope with full 1080p video playback in a variety
of formats including DivX, XviD, VC-1 and all the usual video types. There's
a 3.5mm audio socket and the Galaxy S II supports DLNA and WiFi
direct but it lacks an HDMI port.

Battery size is getting increasingly important, and we're pleased
to see that the Samsung Galaxy S II comes with a very large 1650
mAh cell. We don't know how much talktime that would give, but real
life Android phones can burn through energy quite quickly if you
use them to their fullest capabilities.

As
you would expect, the Galaxy S II comes with GPS and all the usual
Android goodies. Samsung have added their own "hubs" to
the interface, for example the "Social Hub" integrates
all your social networking functions into one screen. One unusual
feature with the Galaxy S II is the inclusion of NFC technology
that allows contactless payments.

Although it seems to be geared up for fun, the Galaxy S II has
lots of enterprise-ready features as well, including support for
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, VPN capabilities, device encryption,
remote management and a Cisco WebEx client.

Apparently scheduled for release in most markets in May (although
some may get it earlier), the Samsung Galaxy S II will certainly
be one of the most advanced smartphones that you can buy. There's
no word on pricing, but we would expect the launch retail price
to be over €600 with prices then settling down to €500 or so.

There's no doubt that this is an impressive piece of kit, and
it goes to show that dual-core devices are likely to dominate the
high-end smartphone market during 2011 as we predicted
they would at the end of last year.